DEMOTEC investigates the role of participatory budgeting in fostering greater and more informed citizen participation in policy-making and in engaging citizens that feel disconnected from political and policy processes. It focuses on citizen engagement in European regional and urban policies, combining in-depth research on participatory budgeting and mediated deliberation in the public sphere with real-world experiments. DEMOTEC will apply innovative methods in seven urban authorities from across Europe, including experiments, deliberative polling, computational text analysis of big data, representative surveys, framing and discourse analysis and case studies. It will provide novel theoretical and empirical findings on participatory budgeting and democratic decision-making, develop practical tools and capacity for practitioners, and produce timely policy recommendations at different government scales. DEMOTEC consists of an interdisciplinary and well-integrated consortium of academic, media and citizen engagement partners with expertise in political science, regional and urban studies, sociology, psychology, media and communication studies, and computer science. The Consortium places strong emphasis on the co-creation of democratic innovation and knowledge with policymakers and communication with a variety of stakeholders throughout the project, including public authorities at all territorial levels, journalists, civil society organisations and the general public.

The success of the European Energy Union and the transition to a more efficient, low-carbon energy system can only be accomplished with active participation from a substantial portion of Europeans and financing for the many necessary improvement projects. The central goal of GREENFOOT is to support and foster this process by packaging individual participation and financing of the energy transition in the fun, friendly, and well-known context that is European professional sports, starting with the most popular sport: professional football. To accomplish this goal, GREENFOOT will develop and implement a community-based financing scheme for renovating stadiums, practice facilities, and related buildings (e.g. team headquarters, fitness centres) with energy efficiency (EE) and renewable energy (RES) measures. The GREENFOOT concept is to finance sport building EE renovations and RES installations with crowdfunding schemes that propel Europeans to become active participants in the energy transition through their love of sports and their favorite teams. GREENFOOT markets creative investment packages and associated financial contracts that entice sports fans and community members to invest in the energy transition, and allows for easy replication of the GREENFOOT concept through contract / marketing templates. The GREENFOOT concept is applicable to sports-related buildings of all types and beyond, and will be demonstrated on three participating football buildings during the project runtime from major international football clubs (French Federation, Ireland Assoc. and Azerbaijan Assoc.). Massive signal boosting and post-project replication of EE and crowdfunding in sports buildings will be realized by the lighthouse pilot projects and a coordinated communication, dissemination and exploitation effort featuring links to UEFA, the EURO 2020 competition and the world champions of international football as an leading example.

The media sector is exposed to and undergoing continuous innovations that occur at a pace never seen before and have a non-negligible impact on citizens, democracy and a society as whole. A significant booster becomes a generative Artificial Intelligence, which already plays and will continue to play a critical role (in a positive as well as negative meaning) in creating and spreading information. Especially in next-generation social media, which refer to the anticipated evolution towards more AI-based decentralised and immersive virtual environments (like fediverses and metaverses), generative AI can become the most prominent enabler of disinformation growth accompanied by a lack of trusted information. Media professionals are not, however, currently well-equipped with supporting tools nor knowledge to operate in such already emerging environments. As a result, there is a tremendous need for innovative (AI-based) solutions ensuring media freedom and pluralism, delivering credible and truthful information as well as combating highly disinformative content. The main goal of the AI-CODE project is to evolve state-of-the-art research results (tools, technologies, and know-how) from the past and ongoing EU-funded research projects focused on disinformation to a novel ecosystem of services that will proactively support media professionals in trusted information production through AI. First, the project aims to identify, analyse, and understand future developments of next-generation social media in the context of rapid development of generative Artificial Intelligence and how such a combination can impact the (dis)information space. Second, the project aims to provide media professionals with novel AI-based services to coach them how to work in emerging digital environments and how to utilise generative AI effectively and credibly, to detect new forms of content manipulation, as well as to assess the reputation and credibility of sources and their content.

Increasing evidence shows that disinformation spreading has non-negligible impact on our society at individual and collective levels. From public health to climate change, it is of paramount importance to timely identify emerging disinformation signals such as content from known unreliable sources and new narratives, especially from online social media, to provide media professionals and policy makers with trustworthy elements to extinguish disinformation outbreaks before they run out of control. However, monitoring and analyzing large volumes of online content is well beyond the capacity of human ability only. In fact, regardless of the socio-psychological and behavioral reasons behind information forging, the rate at which disinformation is produced is much larger than the rate at which it can be analyzed and its effects adequately mitigated. AI4TRUST will provide a hybrid system, where machines cooperate with humans, relying on advanced AI solutions against advanced disinformation techniques to support media professionals and policy makers. Our system will monitor, in nearly real time, multiple online social platforms, filtering out social noise and analyzing multimodal (text, audio, visual) content in multiple languages (up to 70% of coverage in EU) with novel AI algorithms, while cooperating in an automated way with an international network of human fact-checkers who will be periodically triggered and who will frequently provide validated data to update our algorithms. The resulting quantitative indicators, including infodemic risk, will be inspected under the lens of social and computational social sciences, to build the trustworthy elements required by media professionals to create customizable and reliable data reports. We expect that the AI4TRUST's system, based on a human-centred approach to technology development that is aligned with European social and ethical values, will be integrated in the standard toolbox of data analysts working on disinformation.

AIOLIA gives a robust 3-tier response to the complex challenges posed by the need to operationally interpret the EU AI Act and global AI regulation. (1) Recognizing the gap between ethical values and their practical application in engineering, AIOLIA pioneers a bottom-up approach to operationalize AI ethics with regard to human condition and behaviour. Following a selection of real-world use cases, AIOLIA translates high-level principles into actionable and contextual guidelines co-created by leading academic, policy, and ethics-aware industrial partners who represent diverse professional and geographic European and international contexts. (2) AIOLIA's commitment to context-sensitivity is deepened by crafting modular, inclusive training materials following the ADDIE methodology designed to cater to diverse learning needs. Hosted on the Embassy of Good Science, AIOLIA materials will range from lectures, videos, and mock reviews to such innovative formats as podcasts, Tiktoks, and a chatbot teaching AI ethics. (3) AIOLIA's outreach is amplified by encompassing 7 research ethics and integrity networks and 3 prominent computer science networks. This strategic alignment enables us to effectively recruit training participants and disseminate human-centric ethics guidelines to a wide spectrum of stakeholders, from ethics experts to early-stage researchers and policymakers worldwide. Resolutely European, AIOLIA's vision propagates beyond EU, embracing global cooperation with leading universities and think tanks in China, South Korea, Japan, and Canada. Utilizing UNESCO platform with its reach to Africa and South Asia, AIOLIA’s guidelines evolve into an analytic toolbox for key international AI dialogues and processes. This global perspective ensures that AIOLIA's impact is not only significant but also sustainable, contributing to fair scientific cooperation and providing concrete and culturally informed ethics instruments to shape the next generation of AI systems.